Barack Obama has come home from overseas. There are still 100 days left to go. The polls remain close.

And the contrast in political imagery has to get better. It can't get worse.

Consider the visuals from Thursday: One man speaking in Berlin to 200,000 cheering Germans about a vision of America reaching out to the world, while his opponent goes to a German restaurant in Ohio.

Wednesday wasn't much better: Obama meeting with Israeli survivors of rocket barrages while McCain talks to reporters in a supermarket in Bethlehem, Pa..

Even on a more-normal week, the Republican candidate might have trouble commanding voters' attention. Analysts agree the presidential campaign is primarily about Obama — about whether an electorate unhappy with the status quo and ready for change can get sufficiently comfortable with his background.

An NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll out last week found 51 percent of Americans are focused on what kind of president Obama would be, compared to only 27 percent for McCain.

It's too early to know how Obama's journey to the war zones, the Middle East, and western Europe will affect voters' assessment of a prospective Obama presidency. The latest round of polls, though, held out some promise for McCain.

None had him in the lead; he has been four or five percentage points down, on average, ever since Obama wrapped up the Democratic nomination.

Polls taken while Obama was overseas show no widening of the gap. Indeed, in surveys done by the Quinnipiac Polling Institute before and during the trip, McCain was making headway in Michigan, Colorado and Minnesota, key states all.

A new Rasmussen Poll in Pennsylvania, the first survey in more than a month, had Obama ahead by six points.

And the McCain campaign, struggling for national attention, got largely glowing local coverage of its time spent in Maine, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado.

Republicans hope doubts about Obama's national security credentials turn out to be his fatal flaw.

Iraq questions linger

Obama said that voters' reservations are not surprising.

"It's the devil you know versus the devil you don't," the Illinois senator told NBC's Brian Williams in one of the interviews he did with the network news anchors who followed him on part of his journey.

For Obama, the overseas tour seemed to have been nearly everything he could have wanted, at least in political terms. Wherever he went, he was received almost as though he were already president, even though some critics suggested the Berlin rally was inappropriate for a mere candidate.

The stop in the Middle East, aimed in part at addressing reservations among Jewish voters, went off without a hitch, with Obama promising to defend Israel and prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.

Less pleasing to Obama were questions he kept getting about Iraq, the second stop on his trip.

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On Iraq, he struggled to explain the precise meaning of his 16-month timetable for the removal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq.

And he took heat from a clearly irritated McCain over his refusal to describe the surge strategy as a success, although Obama acknowledged the reduction in violence and gave the bulk of the credit to the U.S. military.